Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн регистрации .TXT) 📗
Forgive me, my son, he whispered through his tears. There was no other way to save you. Forgive me, I beg you. Lothar must have relapsed into unconsciousness, for he awoke with a start and could not remember where he was or how he had got there. Then the smell of his arm, sick and disgusting, brought it back to him, and he crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked out towards the south. He saw his pursuers then for the first time, and even at the distance of a mile or more he recognized the two wraith-like little figures that danced ahead of the column of horsemen.
Bushmen, he whispered. Now he understood how they had come so swiftly. She has put her tame Bushmen onto me. He realized then that there had never been any chance of throwing them off the spoor; all that time Lothar had used in covering their sign and in anti-tracking subterfuges had been wasted. The Bushmen had followed them with barely a check over the worst going and most treacherous tracking terrain.
Then he looked beyond the trackers an counted the number of men coming against him. Seven, he whispered, and his eyes narrowed as he tried to pick out a smaller feminine figure amongst them, but they were dismounted leading their horses and the intervening mopani obscured his vision.
He transferred all his attention from the approaching horsemen to his own preparations. His only concern now was to delay the pursuit as long as possible, and to convince the pursuers that all of his band were still together here upon the summit. Every hour he could win for them would give Hendrick and Manie just that much more chance of escape.
It was slow and awkward working with one hand, but he jammed Klein Boy's rifle into a niche of the granite with the muzzle pointing down towards the plain. He looped a strap from one of the water bottles over the trigger and led the other end to his chosen shooting stance in the shadows, protected by a flare of the granite ledge.
He had to pause for a minute to rest, for his vision was starring and breaking up into patches of blackness, and his legs felt too weak to support his weight. He peeped over the edge and the horsemen were much closer, on the point of emerging from the mopani forest into the open ground. Now he recognized Centaine, slim and boyish in her riding-breeches, and he could even make out the bright yellow speck of the scarf around her throat.
Despite the fever heat and the darkness in his head, despite his desperate circumstances, he still found a bitter-sweet admiration for her. By God, she never gives up, he muttered. She'll follow me over the other side to the frontiers of hell. He crawled to the pile of discarded water bottles and dragging them after him, arranged them in three separate piles along the lip of the ledge, and he knotted the leather straps together so that he could agitate all the piles simultaneously with a single twitch of the strap in his hand.
Nothing else I can do, he whispered, except shoot straight. But his head was throbbing and his vision danced with the hot mirage of his fever. Thirst was an agony in his throat and his body was a furnace.
He unscrewed the stopper on the water bottle and drank, carefully controlling himself, sipping and holding it in his mouth before swallowing. Immediately he felt better, and his vision firmed. He closed the water bottle and placed it beside him with the spare ammunition clips. Then he folded his jacket into a cushion on the lip of granite in front of him and laid the Mauser on top of it. The pursuers had reached the foot of the kopje and were clustered about his abandoned horse.
Lothar held up his good hand in front of his eyes with fingers extended. There was no tremor, it was steady as the rock on which he lay and he cuddled the butt of the Mauser in under his chin.
The horses, he reminded himself. They can't follow Manie without horses, and he drew a long breath, held it, and shot Blaine Malcomess chestnut mare in the centre of the white blaze.
As the echoes of the shot still bounced from the cliffs of the surrounding hills, Lothar flicked the bolt of the Mauser and fired again, but this time he jerked the strap attached to the other rifle and the report of the two shots overlapped.
The double report would deceive even an experienced soldier into believing there was more than one man on the summit.
Strangely, in this moment of deadly endeavour, the fever had receded. Lothar's vision was bright and clear, the sights of the Mauser starkly outlined against each target and his gun hand steady and precise as he swung the rifle from one horse to the next and sent each one crashing to earth with a head shot. Now they were all down except one: Centaine's mount.
He picked Centaine up in the field of his gunsight. She was galloping back towards the mopani, lying flat over her horse's neck, her elbows pumping, a man hanging from her stirrup, and Lothar lifted his forefinger from the curve of the trigger. It was an instinctive reaction; he could not bring himself to send a bullet anywhere near her.
Instead he swung the barrel away from her. The riders of the downed horses, all four of them, were straggling away towards the mopani. Their thin cries of panic carried to the summit. They were easy marks; he could have knocked them down with a single bullet for each, but instead he made it a game to see how close he could come without touching one of them. They ducked and cavorted as the Mauser fire whipped around them. It was comical, hilarious.
He was laughing as he worked the bolt, and suddenly he heard the wild hysterical quality of his laughter ringing hollowly in his own skull and he bit it off. I'm losing my head, he thought. Got to last it out. The last of the running men disappeared into the forest and he found himself shaking and sweating with reaction.
Got to be ready, he encouraged himself. Got to think.
Can't stop now. Can't let go. He crawled to the second rifle and reloaded it, then rolled back to his shooting stance in the shadow of the summit boulders.
Now they are going to try and mark me, he guessed.
They'll draw fire and watch for- He saw the helmet being offered invitingly above the lip of the ravine at the edge of the forest and grinned. That was a hoary old trick; even the red-necked pommy soldiers had learned not to fall for it as far back as the opening years of the Boer War. It was almost insulting that they should try to entice him with it now.
All right then! he taunted them. We'll see who foxes who? He fired both rifles simultaneously, and a moment later jerked the straps attached to the piles of empty water bottles.
At that range the movement of the round felt-covered bottles would show against the skyline just like the heads of hidden riflemen.
Now they will send men to circle the hill, he guessed, and watched for movement amongst the trees on his flanks, the Mauser ready, blinking his eyes rapidly to clear them.
Five hours until dark, he told himself. Hendrick and Manie will be at the river by dawn tomorrow. Got to hold them until then. He saw a flash of movement out on the right flank: men crouching and running forward in short bursts, outflanking the kopje, and he aimed for the trunks over their heads.
Mauser fire whiplashed and bark exploded from the mopani, leaving wet white wounds on the standing timber.
Keep your heads down, myne heeren! Lothar was laughing again, hysterical, delirious cackles.
He forced himself to stop it, and immediately the image of Manie's face appeared before him, the beautiful topaz eyes swimming with tears and the flash of blood on his upper lip.
My son, he lamented. Oh God, how will I live without you! Even then be would not accept that be was dying, but blackness filled his skull and his head dropped forward onto the filthy pus-stained bandage that swaddled his arm. The stench of his own decaying flesh became part of the delirious nightmares which continued to torment him even in unconsciousness.
